Your dear Aunty is here today to do a little bit of food and health stuff. Today’s topic is salt.
If you eat processed foods (that is, you buy them in a can, bottle, box, tub or plastic bag at your grocery store), you are getting a lot of added salt (we are not discussing what takes place in restaurant kitchens — that’s a topic for another time entirely). Everything that food processors create, whether it’s cheese of any sort, baked goods, cereals, canned veggies and so on has added salt. Many food items, just by themselves, naturally, have a lot of sodium in them, so you need to understand where you can make changes and where you can’t.
For example: Liquid milk, all by itself, has 100 mg of sodium per cup. One cup of 1% fat cottage cheese has 918 mg of sodium in it. Why? Well, first of all, to create one cup of cottage cheese takes several cups of liquid milk, PLUS processors are adding salt to the process, first to pull off the whey to create the cottage cheese and second for what they receive is the consumers’ taste for saltiness in the cottage cheese.
Now, just for a moment ask yourself this: How much salt do healthy people need – that is, what’s the recommended daily allowance for sodium? And, if I’m not such a healthy person – how much, if I have a family history of heart disease, or already have high blood pressure, or I have kidney disease, should I be allowing myself? (more…)
